Gauging the Popularity of Programming Languages Around the World

Google Insights is proving fruitful ground for all sorts of data visualization and the latest to catch our eye is Will Larson’s Global Popularity of Programming Languages over at the Irrational Exuberance blog.

Larson uses Google Insights to compare the popularity of programming languages around the world. The Insight’s searches are restricted using the “programming” filter and give at least some perspective on where various languages are most used.

Some commenters have called into question how well Google Insights actually translates to popularity, but even if the charts don’t reflect actual popularity, they certain show where programmers’ interests lie.

As for the results, well, it shouldn’t be surprising the Java is big in India, given the amount of outsourcing pouring into the country. According to these graphs the next DjangoCon should probably be in Havana (the image above shows the results for Python). And who knew that Belarus was so interested in Ruby?

Perhaps the most interesting thing is that the United States only cracks the top five once — for Perl. See anything interesting in Larson’s charts? Let us know in the comments.